I had to get him off my back. “All right. I’ll write something.”

“When?”

“What’s your hurry? Miss Homa’s not feeling well anyway. The poor woman will probably die soon.”

“No!” he shouted. “She can’t die. Not now. If she dies, her prices will go through the roof and . . .”

I was no longer listening. I was thinking of Miss Homa. Our vocations of martyrdom had prices and estimates, it seemed. The war too had turned into an auction. And the martyrs were the works being sold.

9

Cleric J stuck close to the ground in his faded blue tunic. He could have been a nineteenth-century dervish in an Orientalist painting selling spiritual mumbo jumbo on the pilgrimage roads of Western Asia. In his hand was the AK he seldom used but kept close. Maysam, a mountain of a man and Cleric J’s head of security from Amara, lay twenty meters to our right. Maysam had the face of a bear and when he smiled it was ample, as if the world had opened up at last and it was a holiday. He was frowning now, telling me to keep my head down. He swore something in dialect that I didn’t understand.

Cleric J laughed and said in his singsong Persian, “Saleh, you are trying too hard to become a martyr.”

The whiz of bullets split the air, sometimes so close they were whispers an inch away. This had been going on for an hour and I was bored at last. And uncomfortable. The ground was mud; detritus from weeks and months of stasis was rolled into the landscape, making it resemble some kind of death-paste. The Kurds stayed at Bartella and bided their time. There was an unspoken border between us and it wasn’t really unspoken. In the middle sat Mosul, waiting.

Cleric J was in his element when he was getting shot at. Tranquility graced his face. He looked at you with clinical eyes, as if to say: Watch, because if this is my last moment, I want you to know and tell everyone I gave it my all. I will go with a smile on my face. I envied him that. I’d left Miss Homa down south in Najaf and told her I’d be back in a few days. A week had gone by, and the enemy’s reinforcements were suddenly like genies out of thin air. It made us wonder if the Americans were not playing us. Maybe they had an entire army of these men under lock and key and were dispensing them in paces just to test our will and kill us in easy-to-deny numbers. Whatever it was, it worked. Men got tired and jumpy. This corner of the war should have been over. I’d come back after three months and not only had we not budged, but now they were raining rockets on our positions. The Kurds, God bless their grit and spirit, occupied the heights and were not unhappy to see us softened a little. There would be reckoning later.